One of the most tiring efforts people of the side I belong to - which doesn't mean Trek side - have to go through is ask, again and again, how a supposedly DET weapon like the superlaser can - according to some people and a certain old EU source - fail to make the whole planet explode as it's still hitting it, and how the final, bigger, explosion does occur after almost a whole second, which can be easily noticed without going through the video frame by frame.
Among many attempted explanations, comes the planetary shield argument.
Of course, for any self respected EU fan, a planetary shield over Alderaan is a given. For any purist, this is nothing more than a mere preposterous claim with no backing up.
But let's assume that there is a shield, there, covering the whole planet.
For this little article, I'll use the data available on Robert's site, on these two pages: 1, 2.
The idea, as I understand it, is that the beam was stopped - temporarily - by the shield, before the shield failed to cope with the whole overwhelming energy.
Here's a list of the issues that lay within this thesis of some sort:
- Only one generator for the whole shield?
It is a peculiar idea. While it would be necessary to explain how the final and most destructive explosion occured on the other side of the planet, how does this mesh with multiple other EU references about planetary shields, which point out that this is never the affair of one single generator only, but rather a patchwork of several generators?
Why would the generator on the other side of Alderaan be the one to fail, and not the ones located midway, between the point of impact, and the side of Alderaan which faced the Death Star?
Why would the most distant generator fail, while the others did not?
More specifically, why would the generator, that comes last in the process of coping with the energy, fail, while the ones that intervened before, didn't fail?
Makes no sense.
One would have to argue that the last generator suffered from a mechanical failure at some point.
The implication of this is fairly humorous, as it would mean that a Death Star has not enough firepower to destroy a properly and fully shielded planet in one shot, and that what happened to Alderaan was only the cause of a really odd mechanical failure, occuring within a chain of units which all worked perfectly!
- The beam does go through the shield
As we can see on frame 1, frame 2 and frame 3, a significant surface of the planet, the one facing the Death Star, is set on fire, to put it simply.
So the beam does go through the shield.
This is an incredible phenomenom, since Saxton's sink hole and wattage numbers, it is a very binary problem that we have on our hands: either the shield fails, or it does not.
So why does suddenly a zone of a shield, utterly pierced in between one and three frames, would still supposedly manage to stop a large percentage of the beam's power, when that zone of the shield precisely failed so quickly?
That is funny. It would mean that a shield can actually let a percentage of the energy that hits it pass through.
Of course, we're speaking about a high power here, but I'm sure this idea wouldn't please everybody.
Well, the partially working shield would have been possible with the idea that a shield is not a dilemna affair, but this latest theory has become the fact recently, within certain vocal warsie groups.
Besides, there is a problem here. In the EU, one torpedo sphere can put a hole in a planetary shield, in a small surface that's generally weaker than the whole surface, sometimes even up to 20%, but not always. They saturate that zone with enough firepower to poke a hole on the surface of a planetary shield, so other bombard ships, and even the torpedo sphere, can finish off the nearby generator and destroy it before it can even recover from the attack.
Yet a torpedo sphere's complete arsenal, no matter the wank, hardly comes close to even a small fraction of e38 joules (not even many orders of magnitude below e32 joules).
So how can a superlaser, that is worth of more than e38 joules, fail to completely destroy the planet from the moment it goes through the shield?
With the fact that according to the EU, a planetary shield is a generator-network affair, let's consider another problem here.
See, more 40% of the planet's surface around the impact point is bathed in white plumes of plasma, and debris are already sent out in space (not counting the already appearing ring - why would it appear if the shield is still withstanding the energy?).
How the hell is the local generator, located on this side of the planet, on the utterly slagged hemisphere, supposed to still be effective and handle all that still remains of the beam that has not impacted yet?
There are still two frames worth of superlaser to hit the planet; last frame before the last bit of the superlaser is completely engulfed in the white hot matter.
And yet, we should believe that a generator, under here, is still holding on?
That pretty much shoots down the idea that the beam was that powerful, in terms of pure direct energy transfer, and literally pins down, helpless, the idea that the tail of the beam was more powerful than the head, as claimed by some enthusiasts.
- The shield generator's own energy
The shield withstood the beam's energy for nearly a whole second. So they say.
And then, it conceded. Of course, a shield which could handle a superlaser for nearly a whole second, must have tremendous reserves of reactant to produce the necessary energy for the shields, to work against such a vast amount of destructive energy.
Which in the light of the latest EU, must be understood as vast amounts of hypermatter, which is annihilated (according to the E2 ICS, nevermind if the TPM novelisation clearly says that fusion powers everything in Star Wars).
And what precisely would happen, you know, when the whole place explodes?
Wouldn't there be a very large chance that the generator's own reserves largely contributed to the final explosion?
Of course, yes.
But I guess we'll ignore that as well.
- Shield resistance against nothing
There's a problem in that. What would the shield have to withstand for nearly a second, while there was no beam hitting the shield anymore?
In the light of the wattage/sinkhole model, the shield could have never failed, nearly one second after beam impact, if the dissipation was nearly immediate.
Precisely, how could the generator on the other hand of the planet still receive even more energy, so at one point is would saturate, if the beam was not hitting the shield anymore since quite some time?
It would mean that the channeling of energy, from one side of the planet to the other side, where the opposite generator is, takes nearly one second.
The problem is as follows:
They agree on the sink hole model for shields. The ICS itself cites shield dissipation rates, which would make no sense if they were not tied to capacitors which can pile only a finite amount of energy; obviously, several times what the shield can dissipate.
It's actually simple. Since the beam utterly failed to explode the planet while it was still htting the shield, then there is zero reason that the shield would fail long after the beam is gone. Especially one second later.
The sink hole model requires that a capacitor gathers the energy from enemy fire, and dissipates it at a given wattage.
If you fill the capacitor faster than it can bleed off energy, it will soon reach overload and burn.
So if the Death Star's beam fails to overload the capacitor, it's simply impossible, according to this system, that the same capacitor would suddenly overload one second later, while it's been doing fine for a whole second after the last bit of the beam impacted.
Basically, we're left with an oddity, where for some funny reason, the shield decided to stop working, while it was doing fine beforehand.
- The absuridty of channeling that much energy inside, just to fire it back
Probably one of the Wongies/Saxtonians' "best" idea, is that the energy is sucked, and radiated as harmless neutrinos. That's the way shields work. Apparently. There's like a vast "volume" of undefined dimensions, that catches any bolt that moves in close to a ship. Yes, I know, that is stupid.
Why bother catching a bolt that will miss your ship, especially since the films show that the shields can tightly hug the hull?
But let's leave that aside, and assume they're just oh so right.
Can this work? Well, of course, it all depends how charged a neutrino is. No matter how you look at it, even if neutrinos are very low interactivity particles, if you put near e38 joules of energy in neutrinos, and fired them within an atmosphere within a couple of seconds, it would still set the planet on freakin' fire!
So why take the risk of having a generator that draws all the nasty stuff into itself, to reradiate it as neutrinos afterwards?
That is just absurd, and pointlessly dangerous. Not to say overcomplex.
Simply put, since the shield can channel the energy, along a curved surface (the shield), and direct it into itself, why simply not reroute it directly into space instead?
Don't ask. I suppose that's one of the Moff's most prized secrets behind the grandeur of imperial's technology.
But let's pretend, for a moment, that the shield does capture that energy, and dumps it into neutrinos, and reradiates it. Aka fires it up.
The shield generator is on the ground. Right.
So the stream or neutrinos, no matter how spread over a given area (which starts around the shield emitters anyway, so it's pretty focused at the beginning), has to go through the atmosphere.
And that much energy put into neutrinos, even a quarter, or "just" e29, radiated through the atmosphere, is still going to end up in pretty nasty fireworks.
Basically, if the shield generators really worked that way, and if they really held on for fractions of a second against the mighty power of the superlaser, we should have seen, at least, nation sized flares on the surface of Alderaan anywhere a shield generator would have been located.
The film, however, clearly shows that a side of the planet is only affected until late in the process.
It doesn't even mesh with how fast the so called shield flares up, which would point out a rather near immediate spread of the superlaser's energy over the whole surface.
